In addition to his studies at Stanford Eric Cornell goes to the YMCA in Taichung, Taiwan, to teach English and to study Chinese. After six months he leaves Taiwan to visit Hong Kong and China for another three months. At the end of this time he asserts, that China isn´t the right working environment for him and moves back at Stanfors where he devotes himself to physics.

Eric Allin Cornell is born to his parents as the oldest of three children in Palo Alto, California. His father is a professor of civil engineering at MIT and his mother teaches high school English. He grows up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and accompanies his father on sabbatical years in Berkeley and Lisbon.

Eric Cornell is offered a position as an Assistant Professor for Physics at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA)/National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1992.

Eric Cornell starts studying physics at the University of Stanford. To earn money he works as an assistant at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. For his whole academic years he works afternoons and summers for the low-temperature physics groups. He earns his Bachelors degree with honors and distinction in 1985.

Eric Cornell along with Carl Wieman and Wolfgang Ketterle is awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates.

Eric Cornell met his future wife during his academic studies at Stanford for the first time. After a long time, they met again in 1993 and get married in January 1995. He and his wife Celeste Landry have two daughters.

Eric Cornell is appointed Professor for Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1995. He holds this position until now.

Because of necrotizing fasciitis, Eric Cornell´s left arm and shoulder are amputated in October of 2004. Recovering from the infection he works part-time since April 2005.

Eric Cornell gets a post-doc position at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA) under Carl Wieman on the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1990. His focus lays on laser cooling experiments and how to combine them with evaporative cooling to create a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC).

Eric Cornell joins the chess and math clubs and spends also time with programming at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, before he, his sister, brother and his mother move to San Francisco. There Eric Cornell attends the Lowell High School, a high school for talented students.

Returning to Cambridge Eric Cornell attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he works under Dave Pritchard on the single-ion cyclotron resonance experiment. He earns his PhD in Physics in 1990.